Journalist / Author / Lecturer

Tag Archives: Ray Hair

I have been writing about the steady decline of work for L.A.’s studio musicians for 15 years. Back in 2000, I covered the issue at length in the Los Angeles Times. Film-scoring work has continued to plummet, as documented in a recent “white paper” partially funded by the American Federation of Musicians. In this new story for Variety, I look at this very divisive issue and the reasons that, according to one veteran player, musicians are “at each other’s throats” about whether to give up residual payments in order to retrieve the recording work that increasingly goes to London or Eastern Europe.

The AFM has become increasingly critical of studios who make movies in the U.S. but go overseas to score them because it’s cheaper. Today they launched a new campaign to call wider public attention to the issue.

One of the most contentious, and complex, issues facing Hollywood studio musicians is the role that the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) plays in their lives. If a movie production company or studio isn’t legally bound to score in Hollywood (only major studios and networks are), then they often choose to go overseas to record their music. A growing number of musicians are unhappy about this, and many are urging the AFM to agree to concessions in order to keep more recording work in L.A. This story reports what many had to say at a meeting in Santa Monica in late 2012. (The headline, incidentally, is misleading; it’s not so much about the composers but rather about the musicians who play the music.) And here’s a followup story from January 2013 on the issue.